In OmniFocus 4, we changed the View Options dialog for custom perspectives so that editing a perspective would work more like other functions of the app, where changes would be immediately applied and synced to other devices. But some people have noted that they miss the ability to temporarily edit their perspective rules, then quickly and easily revert to their original set of rules.
So here is a pair of example plug-ins which will save and restore the perspective rules for the current perspective. (In my copy, I’ve given these plug-ins keyboard shortcuts of Control-S for Save, and Control-R for Restore.)
Hi Ken, thanks for these. This is one of the bigger frustrations I have with v4. I’d still prefer the previous behavior, but it appears that ship has sailed.
I should probably have noted that the reason we made this change in v4 was because many customers were writing in because they were confused about temporary changes they had made to their perspectives. They would see different results in different windows or on different devices, and think that the perspective or syncing or something must be broken.
So while this change in v4 eliminated a feature that was convenient for people who understood how it worked (including those of us who originally designed it to work that way), more importantly, it eliminated a whole class of confusion and frustration for all the people who didn’t understand how it worked (differently from every other change they made in the app).
My hope is that these example plug-ins can bring back the benefit of the previous design for those who miss it, without any risk of causing confusion for anyone else!
Hi Ken, although these plugins help, it doesn’t solve the issue of cognitive load.
In my case, 99% of perspective changes are temporary. I now need to remember to save the perspective and then restore it 99% of the time; whereas previously I needed to remember to save it 1% of the time.
It looks like the rules are saved permanently when running this automation, so it is possible to restore at some later time. I am correct?
Would it be possible to have the save automation run automatically when editing a perspective? Or to save the rules for all perspectives at once, so I can just restore after making changes?
